Happy Heavenly Birthday Brad Renfro

“Manipulated mugshot of Brad Renfro (original 2000)” (2025), NIGHTSHADE (Alejandro Concas-Rivas). Courtesy of artist.

WHEN JOSH SCHAEDEL invited me to contribute a text to accompany Steve Kado’s exhibition Stairs at The Fulcrum Press, I thought about how Kado once said his favorite kind of press release was either “straightforward or [had] nothing to do with the topic.” This might be both.

I arrived at the show with curiosity tempered by a kind of ambient world-weariness. But I found myself unexpectedly arrested, standing still in front of a project that felt familiar—not in material form but in affective logic: a durational archive whose emotional register and invisible labor echoed rituals I had once performed online. Stairs is a calendar. Fifty-two photographs of stairways, one for each week of the year, dithered and printed, then overlaid with translucent acetate sheets foil-stamped with the days of the week. Green, shiny text like the elytra of an emerald beetle. No months, no years.

Stairs elides specificity—no captions, no context, just the residue of repetition, the scaffolding of chronology, bereft of narrative. It reminded me, viscerally, of the emotional logic behind so many of my earliest internet rituals: the obsessive act of documenting something, as if to keep it from disappearing, without knowing exactly why.

It reminded me, viscerally, of the emotional logic behind so many of my earliest internet rituals.

In Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (2000), Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star remind us that all classification systems are acts of power and memory. There is what is recorded, what is repeatable, and what is omitted from view. Beneath every tidy, self-evident interface—every archive, calendar, or diagnostic code—is an impossibly cluttered junk drawer of decisions. What we remember is shaped by how we remember. What can be stored is only what fits.

In 2011, I was a 13-year-old girl and a prodigious blogger. I ran a music blog and a sideblog exclusively dedicated to the television series Miami Vice (1984–1990), aesthetic commitments I couldn’t explain then and sheepishly wave away now. I was always online because I had figured out early that the internet was my best chance at raising myself.

Privately, I kept a folder on the family desktop called “Brad Pics,” filled with images of Brad Renfro. I didn’t think of myself as obsessive, but I was methodical. I didn’t come across Brad Renfro through a favorite movie or any kind of plan, and this period of my life is marked by an amnesiac’s blur. I started saving the pictures the way you might pocket rocks at the beach: unremarkable on their own but somehow impossible not to gather. I collected low-resolution headshots, film stills from Ghost World (2001), Sleepers (1996), Apt Pupil (1998), mugshots, and candids scraped from now-defunct fan sites. His face felt important to archive—not because I wanted to possess it, but because it let me track something more elusive. A sadness I recognized. A decline I could organize. A disappearance I could delay.

I didn’t think of myself as obsessive, but I was methodical.

The following thinly sketched biographical information was important to me at the time of this image collection, sorting, and family desktop storage ritual: he had once been famous; he had fallen from grace; he had gotten fat; and he died young. This presented a very cool and attractive life trajectory to me. That drugs were involved made it cooler in the way that ruin often seems romantic when you’re too young to know—or know-know—its cost.

Renfro began acting at 11 and quickly became known for playing troubled, magnetic teenagers throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. He could be unguarded, intense, a little too close to something real, more world-weary and wise than his years would indicate. He told a friend that he “put down the spoon and picked up the fork,” but in 2008, at just 25 years old, he died of a heroin overdose in the Fairfax District of Los Angeles. As I write this, I’m now older than Brad Renfro will ever be.

Of course, I was sad, too. Sad for the aura of tragedy that clung to him, for the sense of a short and savage decline, for the fact that no one in or out of Hollywood had been able to save him. Sad for myself through him, desperately sad, in the way only fledgling teenagers can really be. Safeguarding his memory on my desktop in this way felt like a means of holding that sadness in place and imbuing it with meaning.

The durational aggregation—the cropping, the sorting—resulted in a unified and precious collection, dearer to me than my parents would ever know when they logged on to pay the cable bill. The photos of Renfro, and my stewardship of them, made these impossible emotional surges manageable. It gave shape to something I couldn’t name: not quite grief, not quite identification, but a recognition of the solemn helplessness of being a kid on the internet.

As I write this, I’m now older than Brad Renfro will ever be.

Renfro’s legacy, like that of so many public figures, is stored on platforms that traffic in partial memory. On Findagrave.com, a crowdsourced cemetery and memorial database, I was able to find traces of Renfro. He is buried at Red House Cemetery in his home state of Tennessee, a place I don’t imagine I’ll ever visit. And maybe I don’t need to. There is already a digitized memorial on Find a Grave. I can even add him to a curated “virtual cemetery,” the way I might make a list of favorite albums on Rate Your Music—a comparable platform, where aural memory is flattened into searchable metadata, stored taste.    

On the site, users can search for the final resting places of the dead, contribute biographical information, upload photographs, and leave digital flowers or personal messages. Some listings are meticulously maintained. The site, founded by a taphophile in Utah and later sold to Ancestry.com, functions both as an informal genealogical tool and a public archive of mourning. It is mediated by volunteer labor, GIFs of roses and irises, and boundless conjecture.

Brad Renfro’s page has over 3,100 digital flowers, along with elegiac user-submitted comments and GIFs. “I love you, Brad!” someone writes. “It all went wrong for you too soon,” writes another. His page functions as both archive and cenotaph: a fixed star in a sprawling infrastructure of collective grief. He is hypervisible, yet perpetually unknowable. By virtue of this afterlife on Find a Grave, Renfro has become a kind of known unknown—visible, categorized, but no longer coherent.

Bowker and Star write, “[L]arge-scale classification systems are often invisible, erased by their naturalization into the routines of life. Conflict and multiplicity are often buried beneath layers of obscure representation.” The neatness of Find a Grave—like that of a calendar or an archive—rests on this erasure. It presents a version of continuity, even as it flattens or conceals the tensions within. The digitized grave appears neutral, even generous, but it quietly edits what is remembered and how. Renfro exists in the tension Bowker and Star describe between the intention to preserve and the reality of what preservation excludes. Every classificatory act is a boundary as much as a bridge.

His page functions as both archive and cenotaph: a fixed star in a sprawling infrastructure of collective grief.

There is something tacitly devotional in this kind of grief characterized by acts of categorizing, uploading, maintaining, revisiting, and inscribing well-worn impressions on the keyboard. But like all classification systems, it requires labor to function, even if that labor is casual, anonymous, or rendered invisible. Platforms like Find a Grave depend on volunteers and digital mourners to sustain the illusion of coherence, of memory made accessible. What’s being indexed, ultimately, isn’t just information. It’s longing, obsession, and half-formed attachment. Like my old folder of Renfro images, the work isn’t visible unless you know to look for it. It doesn’t announce itself as mourning, but it is. And it asks the same question Stairs seems to pose: what does it mean to spend time preserving something that can never be retrieved?

In Stairs, each image of a stairway is stamped only with the days of the week. There are no dates, no seasonal cues, no years to pin the work to chronology.

The staircases themselves, destabilized through the dithering process, are difficult to read. Some of the stairs appear domestic, others institutional, some decorative. None are labeled. The act of classification—the visual cue of “stair”—remains, but its specificity has been stripped, not unlike a digital grave with no body beneath it. Stairs is the kind of work that reminds us we are always moving through structures whose logic we only half understand.

The repetition in Stairs becomes a kind of proof: that even emptied forms still exert influence. That we move through calendars, databases, image folders, and platforms like Find a Grave to enact the motion of understanding, whether or not it ever arrives. Like Renfro’s page, like the staircases we can’t ascend or descend, the work holds space for things we cannot resolve.

It reminds us that classification is not the opposite of grief but one of its technologies. That knowing something—someone—is not the same as reaching them. That even in the absence of dates, bodies, explanations, or captions, we can still look, and we can still try to organize our longing.